Our journey to a family: January 2009

One step closer!!

I arrived home today after running around and decided that it would be a good time to start shoveling some snow from around the house. (I guess someone is trying to get us ready for Kazakhstan with all this snow). In the middle of that horrible task I looked towards the porch and seen there was a FedEx envelope propped against the door. What was it you might ask? Can you say our travel VISA's from the Republic of Kazakhstan!! This means we are one step closer to meeting our Kazak princess.

A weekend filled with love, friends and family

Melissa here. I had an awesome weekend. It started on Friday with a great shopping trip with my wonderful friend Marti. We had a blast and Marti got "Baby Kaz" some beautiful clothes and a car seat from Judy. I then went to Saturday morning yoga with my best buddy Laura. Saturday afternoon I went shopping with Mom and my wonderful husband. We got some more beautiful clothes, thanks Mom.

On Sunday, I was pleasantly surprised by all my friends at work with a baby shower at the Lady Bug Tea Room in East Berlin. You gals really got me!!! We got some really awesome gifts for our little monkey. Thanks girls, you ROCK!!! It's really great when you have co-workers that you can call friends.

And a special shout out to my good friend and fellow obsessed Twilight fan, Tammy Miller (Cullen). I love my Twilight Moms t-shirt. It makes me feel dazzling. LOL.

Love you all,
Melissa

Child proofing

Today we got a money order to send in with the applications for our travel visas. It will be mailed off on Tuesday. We have to send our passports in with the applications. This makes us a little nervous. As many of you may already know when we sent our dossier to New Jersey it came back in pieces over the course of a few days with a nice note from the USPS saying "Sorry this was damaged in transit". That was a horrible feeling and oddly enough it was MLK weekend when that happened. It's hard to believe that was a year ago already.

We also made a trip to Lowes today for child proofing materials and got started on that project. It's hard to believe how much stuff you need to do. We had a lovely visit from Rustam and his proud parents. When they were there it made us realize that we really need to get this done before a 1 year old comes home. Thank you Chris and Trish!!

I was trying to find a cool photo to add to this post and decided that it would be a good time to show our house. The only problem was that this is the only picture I have in my computer of the house. It was taken from about 700 feet while I was flying around the neighborhood in a military helicopter looking for illegal grow operations. Enjoy!!

We got "the call"

On Monday January 12, 2009 at 4:19 p.m. we got a phone call from our agency. We are told that there is a one year old baby girl waiting for us in Kostani, Kazakhstan. All we really know at this point is that she was born with a dislocated hip which has been corrected with a brace. We are expecting to leave home on February 25th and we should start official visits on March 1st or 8th.

We pretty much shared all this info with our family already but we wanted to put in on this blog as well. We also wanted to make sure we could load up pictures. This is our babies, Nellie Belle and Chico. There world is about to be rocked!!